Skip to main content

We raise the dead!

Over Christmas I read Nik Ripken’s challenging book ‘The Insanity of God’. It is built around his experiences with Christians in persecution, as he sought to understand how their faith has survived under intense evil. The book is writter a pseudo name to protect the identity of many followers of Jesus around the world suffering under severe persecution. Here is one quote from the book:
I asked the question this evening: “If I were to visit your home communities and talk with the nonbelieving families, friends, and neighbors of the members of your house churches—and if I would point out your church members and ask, ‘Who are those people? What can you tell me about them?’—what answer would I get?” Many people started to answer at once. The response that jumped out at me, though, was the answer of a man who told me that his church’s neighbors would probably say, “Those are the people who raise the dead!” “REALLY!” I blurted out involuntarily. Several of the men in the room, especially the older men, smiled and nodded. I was stunned. Then, as if to validate the claim, people around the table began recounting story after story from their own churches—stories of healings, stories of miraculous answers to prayer, stories of supernatural occurrences, stories that could be explained only by the activity of God. These miraculous events seemed to be milepost markers in their personal faith journeys. These were the happenings that had forever proven God’s power in their minds. These were the stories that had drawn unbelievers into Christ’s Kingdom. In addition to reminding me of who God really is, these amazing narratives helped me connect a few more dots. What I had just heard in China was additional persuasive evidence in support of what started as a hypothesis in the former USSR. This hypothesis was quickly becoming a conviction: God seemed to be demonstrating His power on earth today in places like Russia and China. It seemed that He was using the same miraculous and supernatural means that He used in the first-century church of the New Testament. (The Insanity of God, 2013)
That quote particularly struck me because it again underlined what we increasingly hear from many missionaries around the world. God is still doing same things we see in the pages of the New Testament. Not because He must but because He chooses to do so. And God being faithful He seems to be really at work there.

The other thing that really struck me is the simplicity of faith in these difficult places. Persecuted Christians have no time for large conferences, book signing ceremonies, political movements, large theological volumes and who knows what else we see in Christendom these days. They are just living it out and counting it all joy. Trusting the God of the Bible and experiencing Him on a daily basis in ordinary life. I long for that simplicity of trust in Christ. Very challenging book!

Copyright © Chola Mukanga 2013
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

An Empty Page

I am nothing without you I am not ashamed to say But sometimes still I doubt you along my way I am nothing without you An eagle with no wings If I forget about you, I lose everything My heart is an empty stage O let your play begin My life is an empty page for you to colour me with your love It’s such a common feeling to be misunderstood But from you there’s no concealing You know my bad and good So I am not pretending my story never fails But I have already read the ending And your love prevails My heart is an empty stage Let your play begin My life is an empty page for you to colour me with your love The words are from Jonathan Veira’s song Empty Page. One of the tracks off ‘ Rhythms of the Heart’ album. I like his music, and especially this song. Sadly, I couldn’t find the lyrics online, so I had to write them down word for word. I have had this song for many years and it has always spoken me at many lev...
Post a Comment
KEEP READING →

Incarnation and Modernity

[The Bible] resituate modernity's prejudices within a wider context from which they were originally wrenched, showing them to be reductive heresies of a more complex biblical reality. So whereas modernity privileges an unchanging a-historicity, in the incarnation God enters history at a particular moment to gather a people to be with him not in a Greck eternity of unchanging timelessness, but in a biblical eternity of never-ending and ever-renewed intimacy and relational richness. Whereas modernity subordinates the particular to the universal, the Bible perfectly marries the universal "image of the invisible God" together with a particular first-century Palestinian Jewish man. Whereas modernity seeks the abstract over the material and finds itself painfully akimbo between the twin idols of materialism and immaterialism, in the same gesture the incarnate Christ validates material reality and prevents his followers from ever worshipping it. Finally, whereas modernity secks ...
Post a Comment
KEEP READING →

Social limits of markets

Kelvin Albertson has an interesting article  where he argues that neoliberalism focus on self interest (expansion of economic freedoms) inevitably leads to increasing surveillance (reduction in social freedoms). In other words although society may be becoming economically freer it comes at the expense of less social freedoms. It turns out the free market actually imprisons : The need for self-interested but free individuals to be constantly regulating each other to promote social good explains the seeming paradox that, as the state withdraws from the economy in line with neoliberal theory,  its role in criminal justice expands . Where the actions of some have adverse social consequences, the state must attempt to disincentivise them through  regulation  and punishment. And this, of course, requires rigorous detection and monitoring.  
Post a Comment
KEEP READING →